The various formulas of pictorial abstraction developed in the second decade of the century shared not only their rejection of the imitative function of art in relation to external reality, but also the fact that they question the epistemological importance of external nature. In 1915 Franz Marc spoke of the “ugliness” and “impurity” of nature. Giacomo Balla in his Manifesto on Colour wrote that: “naturalistic pictorial reproduction does not interest and cannot interest anyone”. Abstraction grasped this phenomenon and its context, that of a devastating and “invisible” war of camouflaged combatants, focusing on a modern representation of armed combat as a cartography of anonymous energy forces.
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